As we did last year and the year before, EFF welcomes the winter season with a new wishlist of some things we'd love to have happen for the holidays—for us and for all Internet users. These are some of the actions we'd most like to see from companies, governments, organizations, and individuals in the new year.

In our ongoing efforts to rein in the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), we submitted a support letter on behalf of Jeremy Hammond on Wednesday, asking for leniency from the New York federal judge who is about to sentence him for hacking into private intelligence contractor Stratfor.

Hammond pleaded guilty to CFAA charges, admitting that he obtained credit card numbers and internal emails that documented Stratfor's surveillance on political protesters at the behest of both private companies and the government. He leaked the emails to the media and major news outlets like Rolling Stone, Wikileaks and McClatchy published material from the leaks. It was clear that Hammond's motivation was the public interest rather than personal financial gain.

In 2010, Auernheimer's co-defendant Daniel Spitler discovered that AT&T configured its website to automatically publish an iPad user's e-mail address when the server was queried with a URL containing the number that matched an iPad's SIM card ID. Spitler collected approximately 114,000 email addresses, and Auernheimer talked about the discovery to several news outlets and Gawker published a story about it. Auernheimer was convicted of violating the CFAA and identity theft and sentenced to 41 months in prison.

The man alleged to be "Dread Pirate Roberts," the founder and operator of the Silk Road—an online marketplace where bitcoins were traded for a range of goods and services, including drugs—was arrested by the FBI in San Francisco yesterday. The criminal complaint, released today, provides many details about how the site and its users relied on widespread anonymity technology, including Tor and Bitcoin.

The increased attention on this technology is a good reminder about how important it is not to blame these tools for the actions of a small portion of their users. The public wouldn't tolerate a campaign to malign the car because of its utility as a getaway vehicle for bank robbers; we must apply the same critical thinking to essential privacy-preserving technology.